Living life online
I’m increasingly living my life online. I moved from hosting my own mailserver to throwing mail at Gmail and POPping it off right through to just using the Gmail web interface. I may have to start doing more of that with documents and the like. One of the big things missing there is a presentation package which lets me create S5 presentations in a graphical way. No, s5presents is not good enough. I want a GUI, WYSIWYG presentation editor. A second thing that’s missing is a word processor like LyX. I am more and more becoming convinced that the LyX WYSIWYM approach to document creation is better than the Word/OpenOffice/AbiWord WYSIWYG way of doing things. I rambled about this a little more on the LugRadio forums a while back.
The main thing that’s missing, though, is storage. At the moment, every online application makes you store created documents there, or on the machine you’re on by downloading them. What’s needed is the following:
- A shared storage server. It should be possible to run your own, or sign up for an account with someone else who’s running it (imagine someone setting up the server at onlinedrive.org or something, and charging £10/month for accounts or similar).
- A JavaScript and server side library which makes it really, really, really easy to save files to a specified shared storage server. This isn’t designed for users; instead, it’s designed for people building Web 2.0 online apps like Writely or Num Sum or s5presents, to make it fantastically trivially easy for them to integrate sharedstorage support into their applications, so instead of saving your files on their server you can save them on your choice of onlinedrive server.
- Authentication to onlinedrive servers should work very much like OpenID.
This should mean, in theory, that when you go off to your choice of online office app, or anything that saves files, and you click the Save button, it says “where do you want to save it to?” I then say “kryogenix.org”, exactly as I do with OpenID, and it finds my onlinedrive (which might be on kryogenix.org, or might be delegated to onlinedrive.com or online-disc-space.myisp.net or wherever, exactly as OpenID can be), and it then goes through some kind of handshake thing and saves my file to my onlinedrive. This is sort of like .Mac is, as I understand it, except it’s designed to be easily integrable with other people’s applications; you publish the specs and so on.
Allowing people to run their own servers is critical; a lot of people won’t, and there’s then a business model for doing it for them, but if you have to use onlinedrives.kryogenix.org or wherever to do this then it’s a power grab by the people who think it up, and people won’t use it (and it won’t get integrated into apps).
I think this really could work. The OpenID people have done most of the hard work as regards shipping stuff around and how to specify delegation and so on, and everyone wins. Jeremy Zawodny was musing about something similar, but doesn’t mention integration, which I think is the critical part. Note that if the specs are published it would be trivial to also integrate onlinedrive handling into desktop apps; you could do it in the major office apps (OpenOffice, MS Office, etc) with macros. If it’s all open it’d all work. A project for someone to pick up, perhaps.
[...] as days pass by » Living life online (tags: web2.0) [...]
23 hours later
This is an interesting thought, indeed. *muses*
I’m here via aquarionics, by the way, and it looks like I’ll be adding this feed to my RSS Reader. Interesting musings.
Gotta dash, as I’m technically at work.
4 days later
That is such a great idea. Perfect!
Why hasn’t anybody done that already? Maybe you should patent that idea and get filthy rich!! ;-)
2 weeks later
[...] Amazon’s new S3 online storage service is what I was talking about when I spoke of “online drives” a little while back, a place to store your data. There’s a clone of S3 called Park Place, so the “run your own servers” part is now handled. What’s missing is integration into applications. That’s something that someone should get onto with the greatest of speed; take your favourite web app that creates things and build some integration so it can save data onto your own personal S3 space (whether S3 itself or your own Park Place at an arbitrary URL). Then submit your patch to the upstream people so they incorporate it, or release a GreaseMonkey script to do it in the interim. [...]
10 weeks later
I really like the sound of all that working together. I’m not very knowledgable about OpenID (I only skimmed the spec), but why would you use something *like* OpenID and not just use OpenID *itself*?
17 weeks later
Dennis: OpenID isn’t for authenticating to a service, it’s for letting a second service know who you are. Observe that the OpenID people say “This is not a trust system. Trust requires identity first.”
17 weeks later
[...] I wonder if you could build a Linux distro where the only program installed was Firefox? You make it look like an ordinary desktop, with “Word Processor”, “Email Client”, “Web Browser”, etc, but the word processor is Writely and the email client is Gmail, both of which come up in their own chromeless window so they seem like a separate application, and the web browser is a stock Firefox window. You might not even need X for this. Obviously it’d be about as much use as a chocolate teapot without access to the net. File storage is online, and each “web app” you use has been hacked (with GreaseMonkey or similar) to save to your online repository; you get a “file manager” which is probably some Ajax thing to manipulate the files on the remote server and to open them in an appropriate application (where the URL of the remote file gets sent to the local host, which then opens one of its “applications” like Writely and passes it the URL of the file to open). [...]
33 weeks later
I think what you are looking for is WebDAV. Possibly WebDAV with some single signon authentication on top of it. There is no reason to have to invent a new service.
39 weeks later
[...] As one final point, I do like the fact that you can run a project and get external hosting for all the key software management bits; bugtracking, source code, specs, releases, everything. That’s great. I like that. We need to get more of that on the desktop, as I have remarked before. [...]
40 weeks later